Last time I told you the story of Bishop Hudal, the appalling so-called Christian who was happy to help any war criminal, no matter what he had done, so long as he was German. Killing Jews was a bonus. Here he is. Adolf Hitler is thought to be hiding under that bit of robe on the floor:

Bishop Hudal’s policy was “It’s a good way for Evil to prosper if you help it as eagerly as you can at every single opportunity”.

Hudal loved to help war criminals. Last time I supplied you with a list. It was not a complete one, though. Hudal Tours was used by many Nazis other than the ones I mentioned. The first lot were enough to get you into moral “deep doo-doos” but these second ones are even deeper and doo-dooier. This man looks fairly innocuous:

He wasn’t a bank clerk though. He is Alois Brunner, the man who organised the deportation of Jews from France and Slovakia to German concentration camps, where they were killed in cold blood on an industrial scale. Brunner was responsible for at least 24,000 Jewish deaths, so he was welcomed with open arms by Syria, who adamantly refused to extradite this heroic man. The Israeli Secret Police, Mossad, used to write to him regularly, and send him little presents. In 1961 he lost an eye to one of them, and in 1980, all the fingers of his left hand. During his long residence in Syria, Brunner was reportedly given a generous salary and protection in exchange for his advice on effective torture and interrogation techniques.
Hudal helped Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of the murder of European Jewry, the so-called “endlösuhng. His career was instrumental in slaughtering between 5.5-6 million Jews.

Hudal gave refuge to Otto Wächter, the man who organised the Cracow Ghetto in 1941. Working alongside Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, Wächter was responsible for the deaths of uncounted millions of Jews and Poles. After the war Wächter lived in a monastery in Rome, “as a monk”, under the direct protection of Bishop Hudal. He died in 1949 in a Roman hospital cradled “in the arms” of Bishop Hudal. How sweet.

Other possibles for the help and assistance of the kindly old Christian, Bishop Hudal, were Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo’s “Butcher of Lyon”, and Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo.

What a long set of photographs. It looks like Mossad‘s Most Wanted. Or the star prizes in the Simon Weisenthal Show.

And did you notice how they were all German? Except Bishop Hudal and he was Austrian and then Austria was annexed and he became an Honorary German, more or less.

I still can’t really believe what Bishop Hudal said in his memoirs:

“I felt duty bound after 1945 to devote my whole charitable work mainly to former National Socialists and Fascists, especially to so-called ‘war criminals’.”

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Were there any Germans, though, who lived up to Edmund Burke’s company motto?

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”

Were there any Germans who just refused to stand by and let evil prosper?

Of course there were and many of them went a lot further in their opposition than you might think. I’ll save that for next time.

14 responses to “Heil Hitler Episode 3”

These stories, John, just turn my stomach at how twisted some people are. How anyone can justify evil especially a “religious man” is totally beyond my understanding. How anyone can be involved in killing brothers and sisters again is totally beyond my comprehension. Some of the stories you publish are so difficult for me to read yet I feel they are so necessary for man to not forget the atrocities of our near past and what anyone of us is truly capable of.

You are so right, Amy. Twenty years ago, at the Holocaust Centre in north Nottinghamshire, one of the speakers, a man who had met Dr Mengele at Auschwitz, asked me, as a teacher, to make sure that such events never happened again. And I’ve been doing my bit ever since!

These are truly despicable people. They used their twisted ideology to murder millions and further their perverted vices. Thanks John, for this series of articles. It is important to never forget the holocaust, and to remember those who so cruelly lost their lives.

Well, thanks a lot for that. I did worry that I was going a little bit overboard, but we should never forget these evil deeds. It seems particularly relevant today after events such as 9/11 or the various episodes in France, when, in a very similar way, a tiny number of raving lunatics killed as many innocent people as they could.

It makes me wonder if the evil is born in them or created over time. Do their actions come naturally or from the company they keep and mob mentality? If we were to ask any of them, I wonder if we would ever get an honest answer.

I don’t think you would. My feeling is that their family upbringing got them started but then they mixed with other people who were equally despicable. The next step is thinking that the behaviour of their group is normal rather than crazy.And the icing on the cake is the gang leader who approves of everything they do and who leads them on to even worse deeds.

It amazes me how many people they killed without a care or thought. How do you punish someone like that, imprisonment or even execution is no match for the suffering they put their victims through. To top it all they manage to get away with it and then be hailed as ‘heroic’. What makes a man like that!

Who knows? They were people who believed that they were above the law and that whatever they decided to do was acceptable. And the catalyst for these particular individuals was that they were all desperate to please the Fuhrer who gave his blessing to everything they did.

It’s because the present day Germans are our Allies in NATO and partners in the EC, so we call them Germans. The Third Reich therefore become “Nazis” rather than Germans . I have taken classes quite a few times to the Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre in Ollerton and the Auschwitz survivor there told me that every single person he ever met working in the camp was a German. Never a Ukrainian or a Latvian, but always a German. He said that nowadays he had no problems whatsoever with any German born after May 8th 1945 but every single one before that, he hated with all his being. They had all known about the camps and just didn’t care about the Jews.

I have a good friend who likes studying about Adolph Hitler and war criminals. I usually try to avoid thinking about these horrific people who went along with the massacres. I will look forward to the “next time,” John.